KM 3A

So because I didn’t complete the assignment Nick gave me a list of events and told me to attend one of them and blog about it. There were about four different events to choose from, and surprisingly I picked to attend a sort of educational one. It was a discussion called “The Psychology of Happiness” led by David Sitt, a professor here at Baruch. Being that I don’t take psychology like the rest of my block, I wanted to see what a class might be like in this school.

I found the discussion to be very interesting, it gave me a different outlook on life. One of the first points he made was that curiosity makes you happy. He spoke about how young children live a carefree, happy and fulfilling life because they ask question after question, yet he stated that we are born as question marks and end up as periods. When we are young we go to school and they give us answers to everything, therefore ending the curiosity; as we grow older we grow less and less curious, therefore less happy.

Professor Sitt also spoke about happiness being something we must work to attain. He compared it to Michelangelo’s painting of David. Michelangelo chissled away at the block of marble he had until he completed his masterpiece. In order to acquire total happiness we must chizle away at all our bad habits in order to get to the root of our happiness. MAterial things may make us happy, but that is not happiness, they are misguided attempts at happiness. Relationships, money, substance use etc. are all misguided attempts at happiness. We must cut those things out in order  to attain this happiness we all want to achieve. A quote he showed us was “the soul grows by subtraction, not addition.” – David Thoreau

One of the things I enjoyed most about the discussion was when the professor told us to make three lists. One about what we makes us happy, one of our talents, and lastly what we take most pleasure in doing. He then had us look over the last two lists and find anything that inter laps. The point of this exercise was to show us how Americans tend to have jobs they absolutely hate just because they are good at it, and have a comfortable life because of it. We tend to disregard the fact that we hate the job, because it has been engrained into our mind that money is everything in this world.

Lastly he spoke about happiness not being a negation of unhappiness. He told us that you could have both emotions at one time. You can be completely happy with one thing, and unhappy with another. The way to achieve happiness is by acknowledging your unhappiness. He closed the discussion with a video about a guy with no arms or legs who was the epitome of complete happiness. YOu would think someone like Nick, the man on the video, without any limbs would be miserable, bt he is the complete opposite.

This is the link to the video if anyone cares to watch it, its really inspirational, and it made me cry.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8ZuKF3dxCY

This lecture was really interesting to me. It made me put my own life into perspective, specially since I was having a pretty bad day. I might actually try to cut some bad habits out of my daily routine, even for a week or two, just to try out his theory. Professor Sitt cut out his cell phone for two weeks and was perfectly happy until his mom went crazy because she could not reach him when she really needed to, so in order to honor her he did get a new cell phone, except he got an old school flip phone rather than the blackberry he previously had. All in all it was a good experience and I would recommend anyone to take a class with him. By the way he’s having a class on positive psychology open next semester if anyone is interested.